Individual Reflection - Garnet XUE

During the two months collaboration, team members like to use Google Hangouts for meeting, discussing, reviewing and enjoying. Because Hangouts integrates video face-to-face chat into Google’s productivity apps like Google Drive that could highly improve team collaboration, especially within a virtual team when we're not together. Through Google Slide and Screen Share, any member can can make last-minute changes to that important presentation, get live input on his or her analysis from remote team members, or just plan a party over coffee.

Moreover, we prefer planning schedule on Google Calendar, because it can always not only remind me what to do in the next couple of days but also make team members informed by each other’s schedule.

I believe my team coordinates across members with high efficiency, contributed by that we can keep members posted timely and accurately in order to eliminate confusion to minimal level. We usually communicate with morning team For example, through Google Doc, after revising part of the assignment, members will be informed and can review the latest version anytime. Before Google Drive, we sent email with attachments to others after revise, but after couple of times revisement, it was difficult for members find the latest one in tremendous emails.

However, those productive apps require knowledge about IT, taking a little long time for adaption.

Internally, we took days to prepare a proposal respectively before meeting, and the decision on what the virtual team do are made through brainstorm. For those regrading to specifications, like who is our customers and what functions the platform may provide, decisions are lead by members who is good at the area.

Externally, before meeting with morning team, we discussed to arrive at a accepted point. Then, one of our three will go to negotiate with the morning team, and take questions back to discuss with team. After two or three circle, the final decision might be fixed.  

For the conflicts, firstly we discussed whether the virtual team focused on operating digital textbooks or on more categories. I convinced them by pointing out materials and figures to support the keyword of “NEW”, because the digital textbook market is the very niche market with inelastic and stable demand, as well as has not attract big digital book companies’ attention, like Amazon.com.

Secondly, the conflict was happened when defining the cooperation area with morning team. I compromised this time, and help to push the project going forward.

Finally, the conflict focused on how to present the virtual program. Aiming to surprise students and present it in a virtual way, I held the idea that present by Google Hangouts in a virtual way. However Vivian and Ivy were afraid that if there was any problems on facilities, we would suffer a big loss. To solve their concerns, I introduced couples of plan B, to handle all accident they guessed.

Based on the Cloud Technology, Google Hangouts and Google Drive helped my team’s work, to make us collaborate as smoothly as we worked in a physical office.

The team formed based on diversity of educational and professional background. The commitments we make to the team are at-stakeness, transparency and synergy.

We three committed equally to team’s decisions because we care deeply about the virtual project we worked and grade we would obtain finally. We promised we would devote individuals’ effort to improve team’s project.

Moreover, we all agreed that shared understanding is necessary within the team, and we promised to share suggestions with others and to open to others suggestions.

Furthermore, we preferred “better” ideas, and based on at-stakeness and transparency, we definitely could work out innovative alternatives to improve team’s project continually.

Generally, we have done all the three commitments in the couple months. In one aspect, aim to obtain a excellent grade, members would actively share their suggestions and do double-check if there were anything missed; in another aspect, without any monetary benefit, the conflicts could be solved more easily.

Group Assignment: Virtual Team, www.virtual.groupstudy.com

www.groupstudy.com

Study is not lonely missions anymore, on Group Study, you can

--Refer to points and solution from people who also read the same book all over the world.

--Share your unique insights with people who also read the same book all over the world.

--Ask for help when you come across questions cannot be solved.

--Join in study group based on couple of textbooks which belong to the same course.

--Hold online tutorials for course review and practices.

Study Group is a virtual community, users in the community are from different countries and are connected with the Internet. Comparing with the physical community, the classroom, where students get together in person to join a lecture or a seminar, the virtual community, www.groupstudy.com is a online platform where users can cooperate with other users from differenct places, even miles aways, breaking the geographic constraints and enlarge their study circle remarkbly from a classroom to the whole world. As a result, information the individual get is significantly more than he or she can in the traditional classroom.

The key requirement to build such a virtual study group is the initiative to share. Goes around, comes around. Merely when all users are positively post their insights, points and solutions on textbooks they read, the basement of the virtual platform could be consolidated and users could be attracted to return. That is the recycle we expect.

Who is our target customers?

Anyone who need a textbook to study a course.

Anyone who will not pay for the expensive textbook.

Anyone who is annoyed by heavy books.

Anyone who need help to complete the study.

Anyone who prefer to highlighting his or her talent in the world.

Who are we?

A startup company, a professional digital textbook provider, based on a virtual office on the cloud, and connected talents from different cities.

The virtual organization consists of four teams, Operation, Development,  Marketing and IT. Operation team is in charge of strategic planning issues like product pricing, categories management, users discrimination, as well as content maintenance. Based on figures and information obtained through Google Analytics, team members are able to build pricing model, setup reasonable user level and corresponding payment plan. Moreover, they can recruit volunteers online, and assign them to different categories for notes archive, sorting content posted by users.

Development Team focus on products issues, ranged from pre-negotiation with publishers to digital textbooks creating and launch, and also including platform experience design and optimization. beside those, they also go to find opportunities to cooperate with third parties in the format such as co-branding, mutual recommendation and so on. All of their design work will be completed on Google Cloud, and then the initial creation will be brought to IT team for coding, testing and launching.  

Marketing Team is responsible for customer relationship management, advertising & promotion planning, Google Cloud provide a whole new solution for customer relationship management, especially for online business. Thanks to the unlimited storage space, users’ behavior on Group Study's platform can be exactly recorded, and all the data will be processed by Google Analytics to enable marketing team to understand users preference and to find out items need to improve. In one aspect, they feedback to Development Team for improvement by Google Keeper; in another aspect, they can quickly respond to both of users’ expectation and complaints, in order to keep and increase retention.

IT Team is responsible for the whole platform running smoothly. But nowadays, the IT nerds will never work as they did years ago. Coding is not an individual assignment anymore, while it has changed to be a highly collaborative work by cloud technology. Working together on Google Cloud, IT Team can easily initiate a crowdfunding to “outsource” some work, and track process on Google Code. When Development Team complete the initial design, IT Team’s Google Calendar will automatically add a new event, meanwhile send alert, then IT Team is able to continue the coding work on Google Code, testing and launching on Google Cloud.

Among different team, members also collaborate on Google’s Business Solution. There are Google Doc, Form and Presentation, which enable staff miles away to edit one documents or presentation simultaneously by holding a virtual meeting by Google Hangouts, chatting “face-to-face”.

Because works in GroupStudy are projects going, the way by creating each book or each user experience optimization to be individual projects, we are dedicated to make it a lot easier and quicker for people to update what is going on (and what is not) in a project, in order to improve communication around assigning, organizing and completing tasks. That not only helps members work more efficiently -- but it helps manage expectations for teams when projects do hit a snag and get delayed.

Therefore, we go to Google Calendar, to schedule the project in an individual public calendar shared among teams with events created and assigned to corresponding members. team leaders is able to track each member’s progress on his or her Google Task. If there are any information need to let others know, people can write down notes on Google Keeper, and setup alert to ask others for help.

Why Virtual?

Minimize operation cost.

Shall we meet in a physical place and sit together to work? The answer is definitely yes a decade ago. However, nowadays, people should reconsider the question. Before Google Drive, we would probably email a document, and a collaborator would review it and send it back or people would get together in a meeting room to discuss and then back to his or her desk to work on his or her assignments. Currently, on Google platform, people could communicate with others in a “face-to-face” way and edit a document in real-time. By checking team’s Google Calendar, any member could find a collaborator who is available for help, and team leaders could censor the whole progress and reassign tasks to guarantee the project going as scheduled. As a result, we may find that the expense for renting an office in downtown and for traveling to a city for team meeting can be eliminate. It is possible especially for a company producing and selling virtual products, like GroupStudy.

Expand source of talents.

“There is not the right person in the city!” More and more employers complain this when they start a new project. Meanwhile, they cannot afford the huge expense like relocation compensation, accommodation and more attractive salary package to hire a “right” person in another city, even another country to handle tasks at their office. As for GroupStudy, there are too many specific work to be dealt with by current employers. However, the situation is significantly improved by Google’s virtual collaboration platform, which enable us to initial a task on crowdfunding platform and then select people for collaboration. In one word, virtual collaboration make it possible for companies to do business which was given up before due to lack of the right people. Moreover, it also highlight value of those talents in a new level -- the value created by their talents expands from local to the whole world.

That’s why GroupStudy must run as a virtual organization. The success of teams’ virtual collaboration ensure the success of GroupStudy’s business, the one that focus on the real-time communication, collaboration and sync based on e-textbook give it the edge.

What is our product?

Where to sell?

Our products, the Digital Textbooks are available on our Cloud Platform, which can be visit by inputting our website address on your computers, or by download our APP on either iTunes Store or Google Play.

How to supply?

Publishers upload the digital files of their books, and then our engineers will integrate them into our platform by optimizing format and display. Marketing team will create introduction and pictures then launch the finalized textbook on platform, ready for users to pay for download.

Anything special?

Group

Users can create a new group and invite others to join in and can join in a group which they are interested in.

Notes

Add notes -- not only marks like underline, highlights and tags, users can use digital pens to handwrite notes in the notes area and insert pictures, audio and video.

Share notes -- users can choose which users can see his or her notes. Permitted users can see the notes when they reach the corresponding part of the book. Second, users can tweet the notes update notification to specific users or groups, and can subscribe notification from specific users.

Save notes -- users can choose where to save the notes, local or cloud. Individual user’s notes that saved on Cloud can be synced between all devices signed in.

It’s an Attractive Market

Anyone in the world who needs to study.

No one can complete the study by just only reading a book.

Therefore, all people need help from others who are good at the area or have unique insights about the course. That is why we can say the demand is unlimited.

By looking around the ebook market, Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s iBook take more than 80% market share, but they heavily focus on best sellers. The digital textbook market still remains as a niche market waiting to be developed.

Therefore, we will not build a super bookstore like Amazon, but our plan is to startup a Professional eTextbook Store, putting all of our resources on the single category.

Price of eTextbook could decrease by a significant amount without harm profitability of authors and stores. Take the book, “Principles of Corporate Finance by Franklin Allen” as an example, its Kindle Edition sold in Amazon.com at the price of $137, merely a 4% discount of its printed edition. In contrast, the difference between printed and Kindle edition of best sellers is usually keeping above 30%.

Under a lower price, the sales of eTextbook are highly expected to show a rocket-up increase, contributing from the affordable price by most students who currently used to borrow or buy from others.

The Internet makes the world flatter, forcing information to be more and more available for anyone on The Internet. By visiting Amazon.com, people in China can buy anything sold in the US without relying on their local dealers and suffering from high price. Thanks to Kayak and Booking, travelers can get economical rates for flights and hotels without relying on local tourism agencies. For those who dream to join in a bigger class at home involving students living different countries, the Internet, the very technology, can make their dream come true. Supported by latest technologies in IT area, like Cloud Computing and Storage, WIFI and mobile Internet, there are more magic functions mentioned above to make their dream come true in a higher level. That’s why our project must be operated on a virtual platform.

About Demand: How to fulfill readers’ needs?

FAQ

If I bought a book by my iPad, may I read the book on my Mac Book without charge extra money?

Actually, our business is similar to Amazon’s Kindle or Apple’s iTunes. Your purchase records are saved under your account – on the Cloud, and you can read all materials bought by your account in any devices installed our APP.

May I make annotations in your eTextbook? I like to make annotations on pages when I reading, so I prefer printed books.

Of course you can make annotations, and you will have unlimited space to make notes, comments and marks in the format of audio, video, picture, handwriting and typing words. On tablets, you can write by digital pen or type notes on pages, and you can also add pictures taken for notes on whiteboard or papers in eTextbook. Moreover, you can even record professor’s lecture and insert the video as notes on the corresponding part of textbook. All the notes are stored on the Cloud, sync between different devices.

May I share my notes or contents with others?

You can share anything you prefer with friends. First, you may decide whose notes will display when you go to the corresponding position. Second, you may decide who can see your notes. Thirdly, you may share part of book’s contents or your notes through Facebook, Tweeter, Weibo, LinkedIn and so on. Fourth, the golden members and above may open a discussion for points on textbook, and decide whom the discussion open to. Other users can be informed by organizers’ notification and join in the discussion, or for a public discussion, users may find the discussion when he or she reaches the corresponding position of the book.

Users can get credits when they indeed devote to others. Goes around, comes around.

1.  Users who create animations, graphs, charts and other multi-media content to further explain theories, phenomena and other contents mentioned in eTextbooks, and obtain endowment from at least two registered professors.

2.     Users who successfully recommend new users signing-in.

3.     Users whose notes were shared more than 25 times.

Online Education -- The way to cooperate with Upstairs

But, to achieve a further expansion, we need to attach these e-textbooks closely to course, because classes are such stable communities that attract and hold students to study as group, then keeping the demand for both textbooks and knowledge share, which is perfectly met by www.groupstudyvitual.com by its characters like very affordable price and super function of share.

However, due to the geographic limitation of the offline classes, www.groupstudyvitual.com cannot achieve significant amount of users. Therefore, we weighed efforts on cooperation with Upstairs. By co-branding marketing, sharing users and optimizing user-experience, we can obtain the effect of “1+1>3”.

1. co-branding marketing

Those websites users are from not only a country but maybe from all over the world, a virtual mean by using internet is the best way to connect the users. When promoting our brand worldwide, the best way is to have a co-branding marketing. Both registered users of the two websites have mutual product discount in the two websites. For example, our website has 3 levels of users, gold user, silver user and regular user. The more they pay the higher level they will be—gold is the highest. So our gold user can have certain percent discount, the same discount they will have in the www.gruopstudyvirtual.com and vice versa. The same will conduct on the searching engine, when users search for the Financial Accounting course video, pictures of the related textbooks which link to our website will come along with the course video and vice versa also. We can even promote a joint credit card together with a bank in the future to make our names more bundled, so when people know one brand, the other brand will definitely come into their mind at the same time. By carrying the co-branding marketing, the two website can achieve the most effective of publicity in a lower cost.

2. sharing users

As our job is to deal with the eager-learning customers who locate in every corner of the world, and make sure their minds can be shared promptly, we have to use the virtual mean to fulfill the multi-shared environment. Otherwise things like user preference, browsing habits, and operation custom cannot be accomplished or will be achieved in a much higher cost. So sharing users can make our job easier when developing new customers and tracking habits of old customers. Users can use the same ID and password in both websites if they like, users’ basic information and even further information like purchase lists, behavioral habits and preferences will be shared in the meantime. Collecting this information requires great manpower and material resources, so by sharing users we can lessen the cost but well serve the customers.

3. optimizing user-experience

Sometimes users will have questions after watching the teaching video, at this time they can turn to our website for solving course questions and do some after class exercises, the more important thing is that they can share their views towards the course. By doing so we can not only optimize the user-experience, but also complementary to each other’s website. Helping each other to complete system optimization and testing work, we need to accomplish the task by virtual means so that we can overcome the shortage of technicians and limitation of the distance.

Team UPSTAIRS Background: an HR company like monster.com in the U.S.A.

-       Employment solution for people seeking jobs and the employers who need great people.

-       Operates both online and offline.

Our Cooperation Product: www.professional-interest-class.com

It’s an online hobby class,

Targeting Customers:

White collars, college students and housewives.

Courses including 7 types:

Handcrafts;

Cooking;

Music & Instrument;

Beauty & Makeup.

Brief History of China;

Antiquities Appreciation;

Ancient Chinese Architecture Introduction.

Implementability

Team UPSTAIRS will provide teachers who are special good at those related skills, and we will maintain the website operation part, like update the videos, attach funny and easy eBooks to the video course, and maintain the notes part so that the students could add, share, tweet and save notes to stay close with the teacher and other students in the same course.